1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of telecommunications. More particularly, the present invention relates to telephone user interface controls for a web interface to a voicemail box provided in a Unified Messaging Service telephone system.
2. Background Information
Currently, enhanced service providers (ESP) offer Plain Old Voicemail (POVM) and Unified Messaging Service (UMS) as separate products. POVM and UMS both require their own Uniform Service Order Codes (USOC), their own pricing, and potentially own provisioning flows. Recently, a need has surfaced to include UMS in bundles as a replacement for POVM. Like POVM, UMS also requires that the subscriber initialize the UMS Telephone User Interface (TUI). In addition to the TUI initialization that is found in POVM, UMS also requires that the subscriber initialize a UMS web interface over the Internet. There are many people, however, that are still not on the Internet. Moreover, a substantial portion, perhaps 30 percent of the subscriber base purchasing UMS in bundles to replace POVM will not have access to the Internet.
Those UMS subscribers without Internet access cannot initialize their UMS web interface over the Internet leaving their UMS web interface to their voicemail box un-initialized. These un-initialized web interfaces to voicemail mailboxes are subject to hacking.
Telephone hackers have discovered ways to make “free” long distance (overseas) calls by hacking into voicemail boxes. One hacking scheme involves changing a voicemail box's greeting to say “yes” at just the right time. Then, when the hacker makes a third party billing call using a carrier, the carrier's speech recognition system will assume that the “yes” provided by the hacked mailbox greeting means that the carrier has received authorization to bill a third party call to the telephone number associated with the mailbox.
Computer hackers would find it relatively straightforward to write programs to find the un-initialized web interface to the voicemail mailboxes. Uninitialized web interfaces are typically setup with the subscriber's telephone number as the temporary password and username. All a hacker would need to do to hack into an uninitialized web interface is duplicate the web login process programmatically and then try each telephone number in a telephone number range. Normally the time to run such a program would be quite long, however, given that web interfaces on these mailboxes would remain un-initialized for long periods of time, this gives the hacker plenty of time to try every single combination telephone number until the correct number is tried and access to the mailbox granted for illegitimate purposes.
Thus there is a need to provide a solution to the hijacking problem associated with un-initialized voicemail boxes.